Orhan Pamuk - Personal Life

Personal Life

Pamuk's elder brother Şevket Pamuk, who sometimes appears as a fictional character in Orhan Pamuk's work, is a professor of economics, internationally recognised for his work in history of economics of the Ottoman Empire, working at Bogazici University in Istanbul. Pamuk also has a younger half-sister Hümeyra Pamuk, who is a journalist.

On 1 March 1982, Pamuk married Aylin Türegün, a historian. From 1985 to 1988, while his wife was a graduate student at Columbia University, Pamuk assumed the position of visiting scholar there, using the time to conduct research and write his novel The Black Book in the university's Butler Library. This period also included a visiting fellowship at the University of Iowa. Pamuk returned to Istanbul, a city to which he is strongly attached. He and his wife had a daughter named Rüya born in 1991, whose name means "dream" in Turkish. In 2001, he and Aylin were divorced.

In 2006, Pamuk returned to the U.S. to take a position as a visiting professor at Columbia, where he was a Fellow with Columbia's Committee on Global Thought and held an appointment in Columbia's Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures department and at its School of the Arts. In the 2007–2008 academic year Pamuk returned to Columbia to jointly teach comparative literature classes with Andreas Huyssen and David Damrosch. Pamuk was also a writer-in-residence at Bard College. In autumn 2009, Pamuk was Harvard's Charles Eliot Norton Lecturer, delivering a series of lectures entitled "The Naive and Sentimental Novelist".

In January 2010, Pamuk publicly acknowledged that he was in a relationship with Kiran Desai, the Man Booker Prize-winning novelist.